Autograder design

This page is out of date. The OK Autograder is now a standalone API.

The autograder is going to use Google App Engine's pull queues to manage queueing of autograder jobs. I'm not sure how easy it would be to move away from GAE; is there a task queue out there which allows you to do this kind of "leasing" that GAE has?

The steps of a student's submission being graded will be:

1. Student submits their submission to the website
2. A autograder server leases their submission from the pull queue
3. The autograder server completes the autograding and uploads the results to the server
4. The server notifies whoever needs to be notified that the submission is graded

The pull queue will just have one piece of data associated with each task; the submission id.

The autograder server will lease a task, and then pull down the submission using the okpy API, and run the tests.